This solution for policy enforcement in virtualized environments provides visibility into the operation by monitoring, logging, and evaluating every administrative action initiated by every user to detect suspicious activity as it occurs.

The new features in HyTrust Appliance 3.5 enable private clouds and virtualized data centers to prevent or contain damage caused by both employees and outsiders misusing administrator privileges. This might include copying a virtual machine with confidential data, deleting the entire virtual data center, or misconfiguring tenant specific workloads in shared infrastructure.

The technology builds on the “two-man rule’ defense prized in a virtual infrastructure (the National Security Administration is currently implementing similar safeguards in its networks). The release also has a high level of flexibility: for example, organizations that want to quickly start observing and logging administrative activity before defining granular roles and access rules can simply use the new “monitor only” mode, which lets them remedy undesirable user behavior and refine roles before beginning to enforce strict access policies.

HyTrust Appliance 3.5 is generally available now. Enterprise pricing starts at $63,750 for a single datacenter site with 20 ESXi CPU sockets.